It’s interesting to note how there are devices to help an artist see things more clearly, to determine proper proportion or color. Many of these devices are certainly useful. I use a large mirror placed behind me with my studio work and a small hand mirror in the field. I’m beginning to find I need a small monocular device in workshops to get up close and person due to my eyes tiring as the hours wear on. Grids are an excellent way to move an image from paper to canvas. In principle, I’m not opposed to using whatever works, but I draw the line at relying on these devices exclusively or in place of old fashioned drawing skills, measuring with your pencil and your eye or using variables of shape from the source model. I see many using these devices not as aids but as regular tools. I see projectors being used more and more, photography in lieu of a live model.

There is much to be said with drawing or painting aids but I feel the results are “too perfect”. What is missing in art today for me are the slight mistakes or miscalculations, the imperfections, the wonderful mistakes that are visible in much great art in museums today created without aids. The looseness of a single painted stroke left untouched or unblended, the hand of the artist as it were. We are presently caught up in a revival of photo realism, or actualism and I feel we are losing our sense of artistry of creating spontaneously, freely with expression. Artists are now being made to make everything as it is and not an expression of what we see it is, of how we feel it is.

There is little soul in much work done today. True there is great technical skill, wonderful facility but little heart.

With less and less art being taught, fewer people know how to recognize it when they see it. Fewer still are creating it. Art today has to be spelled out in every detail, nothing left to an imagination dulled or silenced or ignorant of nuance